REGISTRATION FOR THE SPRING CLASSES NOW OPEN!

In Collaboration With

In Collaboration With

A cycle of 4 lectures by Professor Luigi Ballerini  (Emeritus UCLA)

June 4-11-18-25 2021 at 6 PM EST

 

First session: June 4, 6 PM EST

Dante’s Ulysses and Boccaccio’s Guido Cavalcanti: early examples of a renewed concept of VIRTUE. The value of LITERATURE.

Second session: June 11, 6 PM EST
Florentine Humanism – A philological approach to Greek and Latin Texts. The Fall of Constantinople. Cosimo de Medici, patron of the arts.

Third session: June 18, 6 PM EST
Aristoteles: Ethic s and Politics. Leonardo Bruni  

Fourth session: June 25, 6 PM EST
The Council of Constance (1417) – Poggio Bracciolini – The notion of Honest Pleasure Pleasure. A look at Leonardo Strozzi’s and Paolo Veronese’s holy banquets. The Birth of Modern Gastronomy.

 

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Professor Luigi Ballerini – bio

Award winning poet, essayist, translator and curator, Luigi Ballerini has taught modern and contemporary Italian Literature at CUNY, NYU, UCLA and YALE His books of poetry include eccetera. E (1972), Che figurato muore (1988), Che oror l’orient (1991) Il terzo gode (1994), Shakespeherian Rags(1996), Uno monta la luna (2001), Cefalonia (2005), Se il tempo è matto (2010), Una dozzina di scherzi +3 (2012), Apelle figlio d’apollo (2016). Divieto di sosta (2021). In 2015 Beppe Cavatorta edited for Mondadori Luigi Ballerini. Poesie 1972-2015 a comprehensive collection of his poetry. His anthologies of American and Italian poetry include La rosa disabitata (1981), Shearsmen of Sorts (1992), The Promised Land (1999), Nuova Poesia Americana: Los Angeles (2005), Nuova Poesia Americana: San Francisco (2006), Nuova Poesia Americana: New York (2009), Those Who From Afar Look Like Flies (2017), and Nuova Poesia Americana: Chicago e le praterie (2019).

He has translated into Italian several books by American authors including Herman Melville, Henry James, William Carlos Williams, James Baldwin, and Kurt Vonegut. His selection of Gertrude Stein’s poetry, La sacra Emilia e altre poesie, was published by Marsilio (Venice) in 1999. Ballerini has written extensively on avant-garde literature (La piramide capovolta, Marsilio 1975), Guido Cavalcanti, on contemporary Italian poetry (4 per Pagliarani, Scritture 2007), and on gastronomy: his edition of Pellegrino Artusi’s Science in the Kitchen and the Art of Eating Well inaugurated the Lorenzo da Ponte Itaslian Library in 2003, while his edition of Maestro Martino: The Book of the Culinary Art, was published by the University of California Press, in 2004.

He has curated exhibitions of Contemporary Italian Art including Italian Visual Writing, (New York, Finch Museum and Torino, Galleria civica d’arte moderna, 1973) and Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves (Sydney, Power Gallery, 1984). He has also convened a number of conferences: The Disappearing Pheasant I (New York, NYU, 1991) and The Disappearing Pheasant II (Los Angeles, UCLA, 1994).

He is the general editor of the Lorenzo da Ponte Italian Library, published by the University of Toronto Press)